Walter Savage Landor

Warwick, 1775 - 1864, Florence

BiographyLC name authority rec. no.
LC Heading: Landor, Walter Savage, 1775-1864

Biography:
Landor, Walter Savage (1775–1864), poet and author, was born on 30 January 1775 at Eastgate House in Smith Street, just outside the east gate of Warwick, the eldest son of Walter Landor (1733–1805), medical practitioner, and his second wife, Elizabeth Savage (1743–1829). Both parents inherited considerable wealth, the father in 1781 coming into possession of family estates in Staffordshire, while in 1786 the mother's second cousin John Norris bequeathed to her estates at Bishops Tachbrooke, near Leamington, and at Ipsley Court, near Redditch. These properties were entailed upon the eldest son, who was thus early impressed with the idea that his future prospects were assured. That his assurance needed no reinforcement is evident from a story told by Mrs Sherwood, née Mary Martha Butt, a prolific writer for children. In 1782, when both she and Landor were seven, she accompanied her mother to the Landor household, and was startled by the boy's insolence to his mother. ‘From that day this youth became the prototype, in my mind, of all that was vulgar and disobedient’ (Darton, 40). She evidently had no idea that the insolent boy had, by the time of her death in 1851, become one of the most admired literary patriarchs in Britain. He never became a model of good behaviour, though in later years his courtesy, when he chose to exercise it, was elaborate and engaging.
Education and early literary career
Landor's precocity was probably fostered by his early departure from home. He was only four and a half when his parents dispatched him to Thomas Treherne's school, some 10 miles from Warwick, and barely eight when, in 1783, he went on to Rugby School. There he gained a formidable reputation as a boxer, as well as proficiency in the other school sports. He was particularly renowned for his skill in fishing by casting a net, on one occasion using his net to trap and intimidate a farmer who had found him poaching. He also showed a considerable talent for the Latin verse composition so highly prized in an educational system devoted almost exclusively to the study of the classics. It was a talent that led him into serious trouble with school authority. When required to copy some of his verses into the school's ‘play-book’, he claimed that some of his worst composition had been chosen, and in revenge added some emphatically coarse lines by way of disavowal. Defiance of this kind, coupled with his adoption of the egalitarian principles current in the early days of the French Revolution, made his presence in the school intolerable to the headmaster, Dr Thomas James, who did not exactly expel him, but requested his departure.

Landor left Rugby at the end of 1791, spent a short time with a tutor in London, and then was settled with the Revd William Langley, rector of a parish in the neighbourhood of Ashbourne in Derbyshire. Here he spent a year apparently reading as he wished, acquiring a greater knowledge of Greek and a still greater facility in the writing of Latin. He had already become acquainted with the celebrated whig scholar Dr Samuel Parr, perpetual curate of Hatton, a village just outside Warwick. Parr greatly admired Landor's classical attainments, an admiration which was to encourage the young poet to publish rather more of his work in Latin than was commercially prudent. In January 1793 Landor entered Trinity College, Oxford. With the execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war between Britain and France, radical convictions were hardly acceptable in a university so dominated by the established church, but Landor was quite undaunted by this challenge and soon gained the reputation of being a mad jacobin. Although he was on good terms with his tutor, William Benwell, his contempt for most of the college fellows was notorious, and it is little wonder that his undergraduate career came to a premature end. His contemporary Robert Southey thought he had been rusticated after shooting at a fellow, but his offence was not in fact quite so gross. At a party in his rooms, in June 1794, his guests became involved in an altercation through the windows with the guests at another party. The latter eventually closed their shutters, and Landor took a shotgun with which he had been shooting rabbits and fired a volley at the closed window. Complaints followed, and Landor had to leave, although he would have been at liberty to return after two terms.

Landor spent the remainder of the summer of 1794 in Tenby in south Wales. There he made love to a young woman called Nancy Jones, celebrated in his verse as ‘Ione’. In due course he took a step that looked like a determination never to return to Oxford: he removed his name from the college books. On his return to Warwick in December there was an angry exchange with his father, who had no patience with his son's rejection of a settled occupation, and Landor left home to make his literary fortune in London. Sadly, his first volume of poems found only thirty-six purchasers, and for a time he had to subsist mainly on his prospects as the heir to his father's property. He had friends who offered their assistance, including Dr Parr, who would have been happy to have Landor stay with him. Dorothy Lyttelton, heir to a considerable fortune, knew Landor's sister Elizabeth well, and encouraged him to make his peace with his father. She would have been a suitable match for Landor, but the likelihood is that Nancy Jones had a child by Landor in 1795, and he very properly rallied to her support. Eventually his father made him an allowance of £150 a year.

An elegy included in Landor's Simonidea (1806) indicates that Nancy Jones died while still young, and it is a natural inference that the child did not survive either (Landor, Poetical Works, 3.2–3). Whatever the circumstances, the relationship ended, and Landor found consolation in the family of Howell Price, who lived near Swansea and whose wife was the widow of Lord Aylmer. Her daughter by this marriage, Rose Aylmer, came to know Landor well, and it was she who lent him Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance, in which he found the story that formed the basis of his first major poem, Gebir, published in 1798. Shortly after this she went to Calcutta with her aunt, whose husband, Sir Henry Russell, was a judge in the supreme court there. She died of cholera in 1800. Her death prompted Landor to write the brief and poignant poem by which he is best remembered, ‘Ah what avails the sceptred race!’ (ibid., 3.77).

Gebir, mainly written in 1797, is a remarkable poem, an idiosyncratic example of modern epic, a genre which enjoyed a considerable vogue at the turn of the century. The story is one of invasion: the Spanish prince Gebir reasserts his ancestors' rights to rule in Egypt and is received with love by its queen Charoba, but is killed by a poisonous cloak presented by the queen's counsellor Dalica. The narrative is elaborate and obscure, but there are many individual passages of a haunting beauty that led Robert Southey to write a warmly appreciative notice in the Critical Review. Years later Shelley found the poem totally absorbing, and it had an indirect influence as well. Landor's schoolfellow Henry Francis Cary seems to have profited from Gebir when he came to undertake his translation of Dante's Divina commedia, and Cary's blank verse was an element in the revision of Keats's Hyperion. At the time most of the reviews were hostile, mainly because of the occasional indications in the poem of Landor's radical politics.

Landor's political interests were not confined to his poetry. In 1797 he published the first of his many political statements, To the Burgesses of Warwick, an attack on one of Pitt's tax-raising measures. Its language has all the violence natural to Landor's temperament, though its substance is the stuff of mainstream controversy. Dr Parr hoped that this eloquent young writer might be drawn into the constitutional opposition campaigning associated with Charles James Fox, though this would have meant keeping back some of his ‘favourite and perhaps erroneous opinions’ (Forster, 1.155). Landor recalled many years later that Parr took him to hear his celebrated Spital sermon, preached in April 1800 (Landor, Letters and other Unpublished Writings, 57). The sermon, when printed, was expanded into what amounted to a manifesto of moderate whiggism, reproving the giddy rashness of youth and commending ingenuous docility. This was counsel to which Landor paid no attention, but Parr none the less remained a warm admirer of his protégé.

For some years Landor led the life of an idle young man, enjoying the fashionable society of Bath and London and always in debt. He published a few slender volumes: Poems from the Arabic and Persian and Poetry by the Author of ‘Gebir’ (both in 1800) and, in Latin, Iambi (1800) and a translation of Gebir (1803). In the summer of 1802, during the brief peace of Amiens, he visited France, and was struck, as Wordsworth was, by the lack of popular fervour for the revolution or for Bonaparte himself. Landor, for his part, was intensely gratified by an opportunity that came his way to see the first consul at close quarters, and if his political sentiments were altered by his visit, it was mainly because of the dislike he conceived for the French people—a dislike that remained with him for the rest of his life.

It was on one of his visits to Bath, early in 1803, that Landor first met Sophia Jane Swift, the most enduring love of his life. She appears in his poetry as Ianthe, and was evidently a vivacious and light-hearted young woman who found Landor's choleric outbursts entertaining rather than intimidating. When she wanted to be particularly persuasive she took hold of his ears to reinforce her point, a liberty which seems to have gratified him. Unfortunately for Landor she was engaged to be married to a distant cousin in Ireland, Godwin Swifte, and marry him she did in the autumn of 1803. After her marriage she paid a number of extended visits to fashionable resorts in England, and Landor followed and flirted with her in a rather scandalous way.
Spain and friendship with Southey
On 3 November 1805 Dr Landor died, and his son entered into his inheritance. He had no desire to maintain the family's estate in Staffordshire, and was ready to sell it in order to buy property in a more romantic location. A search in the Lake District proved unsuccessful, but he found what he wanted in the Black Mountains in south Wales. The picturesque countryside around the ruins of Llanthony Abbey seemed an appropriate setting for Landor's ambition to be an enlightened landlord. He had plans to improve the roads, restore the abbey, and plant thousands of trees. Unfortunately it soon became clear that managing an estate required more tact and experience than he possessed. He placed his affairs in the hands of a local solicitor, Charles Gabell, who showed little disposition to take care of his client's interests, allowing rents to be left unpaid and trees to be felled. But at first Landor had concerns more pressing than the care of his estate. When in 1808 popular enthusiasm for the long war with France was rekindled by the Spanish insurrection against their French invaders, Landor responded vigorously, and decided to join the insurgents in person. He persuaded two Irishmen to join him, and in August set off for Corunna, where he raised a company of volunteers and contributed a substantial sum to the relief of the war-stricken town of Venturada. His troop advanced eastwards along the north coast of Spain as far as Bilbao, but took no part in actual fighting. When, under the terms of the convention of Cintra, British generals allowed French forces to withdraw unscathed, he returned home in disgust. Although his expedition had lasted only three months, the Spanish authorities were grateful, and gave him the honorary rank of colonel in the king's army.

Earlier in 1808 in Bristol, Landor had met Robert Southey for the first time. He had always been grateful for Southey's favourable review of Gebir, and now, different in temperament though they were, the two men found in each other a source of appreciation and reassurance. Landor learned something of Southey's plans for a series of mythological poems, and of the economic obstacles in the way of his carrying them out. His impulsive response was to offer to pay any publishing costs, and Southey, although he refused to take advantage of Landor's generosity, felt encouraged to go on with The Curse of Kehama, sending drafts of the poem to Landor for comment and dedicating it to him when it was eventually published in 1810. This warm relationship continued until Southey's death in 1843. They met only a few times, but corresponded steadily. Although Southey suffered from dementia in his last years, he could remember Landor's name when everything else was forgotten. The durability of their mutual regard is the more surprising because of the growing contrast in their political convictions. At their first meeting they could have united in congenial denunciations of the baseness of almost all public men, but Southey soon came to fear the effects of such subversive sentiments, and by 1812 was a confirmed supporter of the tory administration. When in 1811 Landor wrote a radical commentary on a biography of Charles James Fox and dedicated it to the president of the United States, John Murray the publisher asked Southey to persuade Landor to soften the more objectionable parts. Southey's persuasions were tactful and friendly, but in the end the pamphlet had to be suppressed. He performed a similar service in 1823, when the publisher of the first series of Imaginary Conversations took fright at some of Landor's audacities, and Southey acted as a kind of mediator.

One result of Landor's Spanish adventure was a kindling of his interest in the earlier invasion of the peninsula by the Moors, and in 1810 he began work on his tragedy depicting the predicament of the nobleman who collaborated with the invaders: Count Julian. As with Gebir, the narrative develops obscurely, but the sublime passions of the hero are eloquently, sometimes turgidly, articulated:
the agony
Of an opprest and of a bursting heart.
(Count Julian, V.iv, ll. 231–2)
Landor told Southey that he had laboured on it during the day, ‘and at night unburdened my mind, shedding many tears’ (Forster, 1.293). Southey himself was more attracted by the intimations of invulnerable endurance which were an important element in Landor's self-image, like the eagle who stands solitary:
Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his eye,
Clear, constant, unobservant, unabased,
In the cold light, above the dews of morn.
(Count Julian, V.ii, ll. 21–4)
Landor had some hopes of persuading John Philip Kemble to play the part of Julian, but he settled for having the play published as a closet drama. To his annoyance it was rejected by Southey's publisher, Longman, but eventually John Murray agreed to produce a small edition, provided that Landor paid for it. This appeared in 1812.
Failure as a landowner and exile
The agonies of Count Julian were in part an oblique expression of the frustration Landor was experiencing in the development of his Llanthony estate. He hoped to improve matters by settling there. This needed the presence of a wife, and in 1811, after what seems to have been a rather perfunctory courtship, he married Julia Thuillier (1794–1879), the seventeen-year-old daughter of an unsuccessful banker: ‘a girl without a sixpence, and with very few accomplishments’, but ‘pretty, graceful, and good-tempered’ (Forster, 1.323). The marriage took place on 24 May, and shortly afterwards they moved to Llanthony. The house he was having built there was unfinished, and they lived ‘among ruins and rubbish’ (ibid., 1.326). There were other sources of discontent: in particular he found the local people sullen and dishonest. Hoping to find a congenial English tenant, he let one of his largest farms to Charles Betham, a brother of a friend of Southey's, Matilda Betham. But Betham proved to be no more satisfactory than the scoundrelly Welshmen, and he and Landor were soon at odds over payment of rent and use of the land, with meadows that Landor wished to preserve ploughed up, and hedges neglected, allowing sheep to graze destructively in his much prized plantations. When a younger brother of Betham dug up trees that Landor had planted, he denounced him in a handbill that he personally posted up in Monmouth at the time of the assizes. A libel suit followed, and Landor had to pay £100 damages.

After Charles Gabell had shown his unwillingness to act against a refractory tenant actually recommended by himself, Landor lost all patience and found another lawyer, Baker Gabb. But he was no more successful in handling his affairs, and by 1813 the loss of income and the accumulation of debts had made it impossible for Landor to remain in Llanthony. The estate was placed in the hands of a trust managed by his brothers, and a modest income secured to him and his wife out of his mother's rents from her Ipsley estate. The long war with France had ended in April 1814, and at the end of May Landor sailed from Weymouth with a view to settling in that country. He went at first to Jersey, where his wife joined him. She had no liking for the idea of living abroad, and a bitter marital quarrel ensued: ‘every kind and tender sentiment was rooted up from my heart for ever’ (Forster, 1.413). He left her, sailed to Granville in an oyster boat, and then travelled on to Tours, where he spent the best part of a year. His wife sought a reconciliation, and Landor relented, meeting her at Dieppe towards the end of February 1815 and bringing her to Tours. This coincided with the return of Napoleon from his exile in Elba, and the consequent brief renewal of the war. Landor did not allow this to change his plans, scorning any anxiety about his being declared an enemy alien. He later had the satisfaction of seeing (as he claimed) the defeated Napoleon passing through Tours on his way to La Rochelle after the battle of Waterloo.

In order to secure Landor's formal consent to the financial arrangements devised by his brothers, the youngest brother, Robert Eyres Landor, came to Tours with the necessary documents in October 1815. Robert found Julia patient and submissive, and Walter as tempestuous as ever, though surprisingly popular with the local market-women. In the aftermath of defeat the country was in a disturbed state, and Walter and Julia were anxious to leave Tours. As Robert wanted to visit Italy they travelled together as far as Milan, where they separated, Robert going on to Rome and his brother and sister-in-law to Como. There Landor engaged a house, which was his home until the autumn of 1818.
Residence in Italy; Imaginary Conversations
Here, in the summer of 1817, Landor once again met Southey, who was touring the continent after the death of his son. Here, too, Landor's eldest son was born, in March 1818. He named him Arnold after Sir Arnold Savage, an early fifteenth-century speaker of the House of Commons who had insisted that grievances should be redressed before supplies were granted. Landor speculated that this congenially audacious figure might have been an ancestor, and devoted one of his first imaginary conversations to him. Landor's own audacity ensured a dramatic departure from Como. He had composed a series of Latin epigrams, one of which was a reply to a local poet's sonnet attacking England. The censor declared this a libel, and Landor was summoned to appear before the governor of Lombardy, who, after an angry altercation, ordered him to leave Como in a few days. Landor defiantly stayed beyond the date decreed in September 1818, but then left anyway. He spent much of the next three years in Pisa, where his daughter Julia was born. He devoted his energies mainly to the writing of Latin poetry, published in 1820 as Idyllia heroica decem. This volume contained his wide-ranging essay ‘De cultu atque usu Latini sermonis’, which included assessments of modern English poets, invoked by Southey in his denunciation of the ‘Satanic School’ in the preface to his Vision of Judgement.

In 1821 Landor moved to Florence, and it was here that he began to produce his Imaginary Conversations. Dialogue was a form peculiarly congenial to him, allowing him to express his opinions and prejudices in an unsystematic and wide-ranging way, sometimes with that epigrammatic sharpness which is so striking in his best-remembered verse, rather often with a grandiloquence that for his contemporaries suggested the dignity of classical literature. Julius Hare thought of it as a model of what prose composition should be: ‘at its best, where the air of classic antiquity breathed about the speakers, the style seemed to him what Apollo's talk might have been, as radiant, piercing, and pure’ (Forster, 2.87). Julius was a younger brother of Francis Hare, one of Landor's most sympathetic friends in Italy, and it was he who had succeeded in having the book published at all. Five publishers turned it down, and eventually Hare used his personal acquaintance with John Taylor, who owned the London Magazine, to persuade him to accept it. Taylor himself felt considerable anxiety about some things that Landor wrote, in particular his doubts about the efficacy of prayer. But Hare suggested that the proofs should be sent to Southey for consideration, and both Landor and Taylor agreed to accept his judgement of what was allowable. The book appeared in March 1824, and was widely reviewed, though opinions were not always favourable. Landor had already achieved some notoriety as one of Byron's targets in the feud with Southey. ‘Savage Landor (for such is his grim cognomen)’ features in the preface to The Vision of Judgement (1822) as a reviler of George III (in Gebir). Such publicity enhanced the initial interest in Imaginary Conversations, and its ambitious scope and accomplished technique established Landor's position as an important writer. The work's reputation was steadily enhanced as time went on by its association with two Victorian phenomena. The first was the cult of the hero, of the great man who shapes history. In The Pentameron something said by his Petrarch clearly applies to Landor himself:
Among the chief pleasures of my life, and among the commonest of my occupations, was the bringing before me such heroes and heroines of antiquity, such poets and sages, such of the prosperous and unfortunate, as most interested me by their courage, their wisdom, their eloquence, or their adventures.
Landor created conversation suited to their characters: ‘I knew perfectly their manners, their steps, their voices’; he knew them so well that he felt able to make them speak ‘on subjects far remote from the beaten track of their career’ (Landor, Complete Works, 9.273–4). Landor's impersonation of noble characters reinforced that other Victorian predilection, the ideal of Hellenism, associating the classical ethos with a tranquillity that he so evidently lacked in his personal life, but that he sought to create in his writings. The most admired of the subsequent additions to the original set of dialogues (and he published some 150 in all) were those in which classical Greek and Roman characters figured. The same ethos pervades the imagined correspondence of Pericles and Aspasia (1836), and, with little modification, the conversations between Boccaccio and Petrarch in the Pentameron (1837).

One of the more favourable assessments of Imaginary Conversations had been William Hazlitt's in the Edinburgh Review. He visited Florence with his second wife in February 1825, and boldly introduced himself to Landor. Their vehement temperaments and fiercely held iconoclastic opinions proved mutually congenial, and according to Hazlitt it was he who introduced Landor to Leigh Hunt and thus to a number of younger writers and artists in Florence whose friendship he came to value. These included the painter Seymour Kirkup, and Charles Armitage Brown, the friend of John Keats. He was also friendly with an Irish peer, the thirteenth Viscount Dillon, a man as boisterous and unconventional as Landor himself. Later, in 1827, Landor made the acquaintance of Marguerite, countess of Blessington, who was in Italy gathering materials for her Conversations of Lord Byron. She was deeply impressed by his ‘high breeding and urbanity’ (Blessington, 494), and Landor for his part thought that he had never talked with a woman more elegant or better informed (Forster, 2.139). In this sympathetic circle he found encouragement to continue with the composition of his conversations; Henry Colburn published a further volume in 1828, and James Duncan two more in 1829. Landor had quarrelled with John Taylor over delays in payment for the first volumes and the arrangements for the third, evidence that he was at last seeing himself as a professional writer who might gain an income from his pen.

As his reputation grew, Landor received many visits from visitors to Florence, notably Wordsworth's friend Henry Crabb Robinson and the young Ralph Waldo Emerson. But there was constant friction in his relationships with local people. Slighting remarks about the Florentines in the first edition of Imaginary Conversations were translated into Italian and hardly encouraged friendly feeling. He became known, too, as a troublesome and violent resident. The state archives contain records of a number of cases in which Landor is alleged to have committed a variety of assaults, kicking tradesmen, knocking them down, and thrashing them. He was said to have thrown scalding water at a maidservant. By his own account his relations with the authorities were stormy. He reacted to the failure of the courts to recover stolen goods by threatening to drag the president of the Buon Governo (the minister of police) before the grand duke ‘by the throat’:
The next morning I had an order from the commissary to attend him. I went; and he read to me an order from the president to be out of Tuscany in three days. ‘Tell the president I shall neither be out of Tuscany nor out of Florence in three days; and let him use force if he dares; I will repel it.’(letter to Southey, July 1829; Forster, 2.218–19)
Landor soon afterwards did indeed leave the city of Florence, but only for Fiesole, 3 miles to the west, where a wealthy admirer, Joseph Ablett, enabled him to buy the Villa Gherardesca. It was a beautiful situation in itself, but the association of the neighbourhood with Boccaccio and Milton enhanced Landor's satisfaction. There were extensive grounds attached to the villa, and he embarked on an ambitious programme of planting. This led him into yet another long-running dispute with a neighbour, who complained that Landor was depriving him of water: an affair of which he gives a lively account in High and Low Life in Italy (1837).
Separation from his wife and return to England
A second son, Walter, had been born in 1822, and a third, Charles, in 1825. Landor's children gave him boundless pleasure while they were young, but his family life was increasingly soured by tensions with his wife. A visit to Florence in 1829 by his ‘Ianthe’, now the comtesse de Molandé, seems to have created an insurmountable jealousy. Mrs Landor took to insulting her husband before company, and after an embarrassing scene witnessed by Charles Armitage Brown in March 1835 Landor left the house, and in September he returned to England. He had already been there on a summer visit in 1832, when he had enjoyed the prestige due to the author of Imaginary Conversations, meeting again with Southey, and finding his way to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb. Now, settled first in Clifton, near Bristol, and then, from October 1837, in Bath, he found himself for the next twenty-three years established as a man of letters of acknowledged distinction. He widened his circle of friends through his visits to the countess of Blessington's house in London, coming to know Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, as well as John Forster, who was to be the biographer of both himself and Dickens. He found much pleasure in the attentions of younger women, as is shown particularly in his letters to Rose Paynter, a niece of Rose Aylmer whom she greatly resembled. His own children were a continuing disappointment to him. Arnold visited England in 1842, but gave his father little affection. Young Walter came over in both 1841 and 1843, on the second occasion accompanied by his sister Julia. Julia proved to be more responsive to her father's goodwill, but even she turned against him in later years when, in 1855, he was unable to raise money to enable her to marry a French count.

In spite of these vexations, Landor was a steadily prolific writer, in the earlier part of this period producing work in the classical mode such as The Pentameron, and experimenting with verse drama in Andrea of Hungary and Giovanna of Naples (1839). Forster encouraged him to prepare a comprehensive edition of his writings. He spent nearly three years overseeing this project, and the Collected Works appeared in two large volumes in 1846. They proved relatively successful, being reprinted three times. A collection of his writings in Latin, Poemata, followed in 1847. Landor also came to be something of a political figure: his Letters of a Conservative (1836) was a call for radical reform of the Church of England. His conservative principles were, indeed, distinctly idiosyncratic, combining fierce support for anti-monarchical movements abroad with a detestation of the moneyed interest at home. His ideas are clearly expounded in his ‘Reflections on Athens at the Decease of Pericles’, an essay appended to the first edition of Pericles and Aspasia. He contributed many letters to the newspaper The Examiner, where John Forster was a regular contributor and, between 1847 and 1855, the editor. Landor was exhilarated by the revolutionary upsurge in 1848, in particular championing the Hungarians and their leader Louis Kossuth. He shared the popular hostility in England to Russia, and eagerly supported the Crimean War. He was particularly notorious for his advocacy of tyrannicide (though in general he was opposed to capital punishment), and incurred much censure when in January 1858 Felice Orsini made an attempt on the life of Napoleon III. Napoleon escaped, but many bystanders were killed. Landor had indeed met Orsini, and was accused of inciting him, though there was no basis for such a charge. He was deeply shocked by the loss of innocent lives.
Second exile and death
The opprobrium attaching to the Orsini affair damaged Landor's standing in a libel case that drove him a second time into exile. In 1856 he had become acquainted with a clergyman and his wife, Morris and Mary Jane Yescombe. They had taken under their care a young woman called Geraldine Hooper, whom Landor found attractive. He addressed poems to her (as ‘Erminine’) and gave her many gifts: these found their way into Mrs Yescombe's keeping. Eventually, early in 1857, Landor began to suspect that Mrs Yescombe was exploiting Geraldine to enrich herself, and rashly published an attack on her in a pamphlet, Walter Savage Landor and the Honorable Mrs Yescombe. A libel action was threatened, but John Forster persuaded Landor to sign a retractation. The offence was repeated in three poems included in Landor's next publication, Dry Sticks, Fagoted by Walter Savage Landor (1858). Mrs Yescombe initiated an action for libel, and when it came to court in August 1858 she was awarded £1000 in damages. The newspapers reacted with eloquent denunciations of this libeller and advocate of tyrannicide. By then, though, Landor was no longer in England. He was in poor h

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